The week in public services: 4th February 2020
This week: fixing criminal justice; the weird politics of a minimum school funding guarantee; and the gender pay gap in general practice
Health and Social Care
The New Economics Foundation have published a new report arguing that local authorities need to change the way they commission social care to reduce the power of the few big shareholders who control most of the social care private providers. In their words, “new money for social care should be used to support new forms of democratic ownership that shift power to care workers and, above all, to people needing support, their families and communities”.
Reminding us why social care matters, the results of learning disability charity HFT’s annual survey of social care providers found that one in five organisations said they had offered care to fewer people last year. Providers said this was because they were unable to provide care at the price local authorities were paying.
Elsewhere, the Health Foundation, in their look at the wider determinants of health, have tried to analyse the effects of the quality of work people do on their health. They estimate that 36% of employees report being in low-quality work, of whom 15% report having poor health (in comparison to only 7% who do not report problems with their work) — and that high employment has not resulted in better job quality.
Another new report from NHS Providers — a membership body for NHS Trusts — lays out the case for more capital spending and reforming the rules on how it is spent. Most NHS Trust leaders surveyed said that inadequate capital funding was harming patient safety and making it harder to increase productivity.
Interesting new Institute for Public Policy Research analysis shows that general practice has one of the highest gender pay gaps of any profession — on average, a 17% gap, compared to the UK average gap of 16.2%. One big factor is that most male GPs are partners while most female GPs are salaried (who typically earn less).
Last but not least, Anna Charles has analysed NHS England and NHS Improvement’s latest announcement that they will test new community services, delivered by community providers, adult social care teams and other NHS staff to ensure older people receive reablement within two days of referral in seven ‘accelerator’ sites. This target, due to be rolled out nationally by 2023, will be the first ever national targets for community services. NHS England will need to tread carefully, given it’s already seen quite a backlash about its ‘restrictive’ new GP contract. Success will almost certainly also depend on the social care workforce, which doesn’t lay directly within NHS England’s control…
Children and Young People
Really interesting attempt from Dave Thomson to quantify how widespread school ‘mass entries’ are — where schools enter most of their pupils for subjects which are perceived to be easy to pass, in order to help get as many pupils as possible receive five A*- C grades. It’s not unusual for schools to enter most of their pupils into a single subject, but not all of them are entering ‘generously-scored’ subjects — so it’s not clear how much of this is really gaming. Thomson has also blogged about what we (don’t) know about what kinds of subjects disadvantaged students enter.
New research from Simon Burgess and Lucinda Platt looks at how relationships between pupils of different ethnicities varies between schools, and what determines whether relationships are good or bad. They find that pupils report more positive feelings and having more friends in other ethnic groups when schools have a more diverse intake of pupils.
Outside of the world of research, Hannah Al-Othman wrote a great story about new Conservative MPs lobbying for higher school funding, and the implications of the government’s new electoral coalition.
On the same day, the government recommitted to minimum funding levels in primary and secondary schools. The key question is whether new Conservative MPs will stand by and watch as this change to the funding formula will channel more money towards schools with children with lower levels of disadvantage? (Those children generally don’t tend to be in their constituencies…)
Local Government
Good summary of what’s happening to libraries in England from the House of Commons library.
Law and order
Following on from Rory Stewart’s pledge to improve security and reduce drug-taking in 10 prisons, the government has announced that it’ll spend almost 30% of it’s £100m announced last year to install X-ray scanners at 16 prisons. This seems sensible — there are good reasons to believe scanners reduced the volume of drugs in prisons and contributed to the decline in positive drug tests in the ten target prisons. New prison safety figures released last week suggest that the slow turnaround in improving prison safety continues — although, sadly, incidents of self-harm are still rising.
Part of Rory Stewart’s agenda was also trying to reduce the size of the prison population, by making greater use of community sentences and probation. The Johnson government appears to have jettisoned that commitment, but this excellent Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology briefing note summarises what we do and don’t know about the effectiveness of these sentences. Worth your time.
MOPAC — the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime — have released a great summary ‘horizon scan’ of what the latest research means for policing in London. Complete with a short summary of the methodology, and a comment on its robustness. I did not know they produced these. Well worth checking out!
A great report by the Behavioural Insights Team looks at what we know about violence, and the best ways to respond to it, in London. All of it is interesting — my biggest takeaways were that deprivation is still the strongest predictor of violence in neighbourhoods — BUT — high levels of social cohesion can ‘protect’ these areas against violence. Crimes are also intensely local — in London, 20% of residential burglaries take place within just 1% of addresses.
Last but not least Nick Hardwick, the former chief inspector of prisons, has summarised what 2020 holds for the criminal justice system. His conclusions — that you need ministerial stability at the MoJ and to treat the criminal justice system as a system not a set of different public services — are spot on.
